By Howard W. French, WPR, Wednesday, May 19, 2021
As an American, watching the violence explode between Israel and Palestinians over the past two weeks has felt like awakening from a heavy narcotic sleep.
The drug, in this instance, has been the willful and persistent denial embraced by American politicians and media alike about the grave crisis that, though less visible recently, has been ticking like a time bomb in this part of the Middle East for years.
As the situation between Israel and Palestinians has grown steadily more dangerous, the doses of denial needed to ignore it, too, have like a narcotic become constantly bigger. It is easy to scorn the diplomacy of the Trump administration, because the delusion on which it was based was not only greatest, but was also most openly, even proudly, on exhibit. But the constant, persistent drip of American diplomacy’s narcotic approach toward this crisis dates back decades—and betrays no particular partisan flavor.
The challenges of securing peace and justice in this corner of the world are, without doubt, extremely complex, but the central problem at the heart of this crisis of denial can nonetheless be stated fairly simply: Israel has been steadily settling land it seized and occupied through war with its neighbors, while simultaneously relegating its Arab citizens, who represent a fifth of the Israeli population, to increasingly abject, second-class status.
Successive American administrations have been meek about the first problem and all but silent on the second. Under Bill Clinton, the United States tentatively sought to withhold money from its generous annual aid package for Israel to avoid subsidizing its settlements in the occupied West Bank, but ponied up most of the money in the end and subsequently said little about the settlements. Barack Obama made a settlement freeze a centerpiece of his administration’s push for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his repeated demands were rebuffed by Israel with no negative impact on American largesse.
By official count, Washington has granted Israel the equivalent of nearly $253 billion in aid since the nation’s founding in 1948 and has recently furnished that assistance at a rhythm of about $3 billion a year. This makes Israel unique in at least two respects. The first is that it receives such generous assistance despite its high level of economic development. Even more remarkable, though, is that the United States makes so little effort to leverage its help politically as it does with most aid recipients.
Taken together, rather than helping its close friend, as American aid is supposed to do, America’s non-responses to the barely concealed crisis identified above, coupled with its nearly unconditional support for Israel, has only made a very dangerous situation worse.
During the Trump administration, Washington even began pretending that Palestinians could be imagined out of the political reality that underlies the region’s looming seismic dangers. Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, brushing aside Palestinian claims to the city, and did so without seeking any commitments from Israel about future settlements or rights for Arabs, whether those who live in occupied territories or in Israel as citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump officials played an important role in helping midwife the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. There was hope that a similar normalization would be worked out with Saudi Arabia, the most important Arab player in the region that still lacks ties with Israel. But the clock ran out on Trump’s diplomacy.
Any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will require Washington to find its long-lost voice about the fundamental injustice that is bound up in this crisis.
On the face of it, peace declarations sound like a wonderful thing, but the logic behind this push merely reflected an acceleration or deepening of American denial: If one can get the Arab states to accept regular diplomatic ties with Israel, then the problem of resolving its conflict with Palestinians will gradually fade away.
The Trump approach has been followed by another kind of make-believe. The Biden administration has surprised most observers for the boldness of some of its policies, especially when one considers the narrow margins of its majority in Congress. When it comes to the smoldering crisis between Israel and Palestine, though, it has acted as if it believes that by keeping its head down, the tectonic plates storing up explosive tension in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza will somehow slow or stop grinding away.
Today, even confronted with proof that this approach won’t work, the Biden administration has mustered little more than strangely blind and morally numb statements—chestnuts retrieved from the ineffective American diplomatic vocabulary of the past. Here one speaks of ritualized phrases like, “Israel has the right to self-defense,” or the assertion that there is no equivalence between rocket attacks by Hamas and any behavior by the Israeli government.
No defense is offered here for Hamas’ rocketing of civilian areas of Israel in the current conflict or of Israel’s aerial bombardment of some of the most densely inhabited territory on earth in Gaza. But to pretend that problematic Israeli behavior both in recent weeks and for many years now has nothing to do with the explosion of violence is to help no one.
The United States does not possess a magical key for resolving these problems, but surely any solution, however difficult, will require Washington to find its long-lost voice about the fundamental injustice that is bound up in this crisis. This becomes all but impossible when language that is marshaled to denounce extremism is levied only toward one side in the equation. Yes, Hamas is violent and even reckless, but so are many of the ultra-conservative elements in Israeli society that have come to play a steadily larger role in the country’s politics over the past two decades. Their push for ever-expanding settlements and for the gradual destitution of Palestinians, both economically and politically, lacks the fireworks of rockets but is every bit as explosive.
In the face of this, Washington has completely lost its tongue. So-called moderate Arab states may have become pacified through recent diplomacy, economic ties and a shared distrust of Iran. But the crisis of Palestinian life has not gone away, nor will it. In fact, as this latest explosion of violence has shown, war can take any number of forms, and the latest incarnation of the conflict points to deepening darkness and existential danger for Israel. Here one speaks of the communal violence that has broken out in recent days on the streets of places like Haifa and Lod, or Lydda for its Arab residents. This is very different from violence between states or state-like actors, because it runs into the very fabric of a society.
Israel would like to be a Jewish state, and for many of its citizens, at least, it clings to the idea of being a democracy. To be a true friend to Israel, the U.S. must emerge from its denial in order to find real balance and help seek a resolution to this seemingly inextricable contradiction.
Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer, and the author of four books, including most recently “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power.” You can follow him on Twitter @hofrench